Your letter found me, as you would wish, in the Iliad, to which I return with ever greater pleasure, for one is always raised up above everything earthly, just as in an air balloon, and one finds oneself truly in the intermediate zone where the gods glide to and fro.
Goethe, writing to Schiller, 12 May 1798
One measure of man’s advance from his most primitive beginnings to something we call civilization is the way in which he controls his myths, his ability to distinguish between the areas of behaviour, the extent to which he can bring more and more of his activity under the rule of reason. In that advance the Greeks have been pre-eminent.
M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1954)